In many lines of business, and particularly in the telecommunications industries, managing information for a large number of customers may become quite complicated. Further, customer bills are often adjusted by various discounts. Applying the discounts to the bills, particularly in the telecommunications industries, may quickly become complicated due to the large number of customers and the large amounts of data for each customer during a particular billing period.
In an existing method for rendering discounts, a complex application specific software package is developed to render discounts in a particular billing system having a highly defined structure. The application specific software package is developed for a single company to use for their customers, and is tailored to meet the specific needs of that company. As such, developing a discount rendering software package is expensive, and takes a lot of time. As such, it is not feasible to change the way in which discounts are rendered very often, because the software package is so application specific that it is sometimes necessary to develop an entire new application specific software package in order to revise the discount rendering technique. Further, because the package generally is implemented for use with a highly defined billing structure, these applications are generally not usable by others than the company that the particular package is designed for.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a method for managing information and rendering discounts in a billing system that is more easily modified and may be ported to different platforms without excessive difficulties.